Category Archives: Energy-Environment

India’s Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill

Posted on by
Reply

A radioactive Bill fraught with big risks

The Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill seeks to burden the Indian taxpayer and encumber the rights of victims of any potential radioactive release from a foreign-built plant.

BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Hindu, March 13, 2010  [For full text of the Bill, click http://ow.ly/1jRas]

The government has finally released the text of its controversial nuclear-accident liability Bill. The text not only confirms the concerns expressed earlier over key elements of the proposed law, but also raises additional issues of worry.

What stands out in the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill is the extent to which it goes to aid the business interests of the foreign reactor builders. In the process, the Bill seeks to financially burden the Indian taxpayer and encumber the rights of victims of any potential radioactive release from a foreign-built plant.

A special Indian law limiting liability in amount and in time has been sought by Washington for its nuclear-exporting firms, with the largest two, Westinghouse and General Electric (GE), set to win multibillion-dollar contracts to build several commercial nuclear power reactors. To forestall lawsuits filed against American suppliers in U.S. courts by victims of a nuclear catastrophe, Washington has also pressed for exclusive jurisdiction for Indian courts so that there will be no repeat of what happened after the Bhopal gas disaster. The Bill seeks to help out the U.S. firms on these counts, going at times even beyond what American law provides.

Under the Bill, the foreign reactor builder — however culpable it is for a nuclear accident — will be completely immune from any victim-initiated civil suit or criminal proceedings in an Indian court or in a court in its home country. The Bill actually turns the legal liability of a foreign reactor supplier for an accident into mere financial compensation — that too, pegged at a pittance and routed through the Indian state operator of the plant. Foreign suppliers will have no direct accident-related liability.

The foreign builders will bask under legal immunity because the Bill channels all legal liability to the Central Government. Clause 7 states the “Central Government shall be liable for nuclear damage in respect of a nuclear incident” when such liability exceeds the Rs.500-crore liability limit of the operator or where the accident occurs “in a nuclear installation owned by it [the Indian government].” The Union government will own all foreign-built reactors.

Indeed, the Bill creates a specious distinction between the operator and the government when both are fused in the Indian context. After all, it is the Indian state which will run all foreign-built plants through its operator, the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL). Yet, throughout the Bill, the pretence of a U.S.-style separation between the operator and the government is maintained.

Under Clause 6, the maximum liability of the operator and the government combined has been set at “the rupee equivalent of 300 million special drawing rights (SDRs),” or Rs.2,087 crore ($458 million) — 23 times lower than the private-sector funds available under the equivalent U.S. law, the controversial Price-Anderson Act (labelled “Half-Price Anderson” by critics). Of this, the total liability of the operator has been limited to Rs.500 crore ($109 million). The Central government will be liable for damages in excess of Rs.500 crore but only up to Rs.2,087 crore.

In actual fact, all liability falls on the Indian taxpayer, whether it is the operator’s slice or the Central government’s portion. In contrast, the Price-Anderson system is without cost to the American taxpayer. In fact, the U.S., like Germany or Finland, has no cap on accident liability, with the U.S. Congress serving as the insurer of last resort.

The Indian state operator, the NPCIL, through a construction contract, can make the foreign builder legally responsible to pay compensation for an accident. But the amount payable by a foreign builder can only be up to the state operator’s own liability ceiling, which is a trifling Rs.500 crore ($109 million).

So, even if the accident were triggered by wilful negligence on the part of the foreign supplier and the consequences were catastrophic, all claims would have to be filed against the Indian state — with the NPCIL required to disburse the first Rs. 500 crore and the Central government the second portion up to Rs. 2,087 crore. The NPCIL could, in turn, try to recover its Rs. 500 crore from the foreign supplier. But for the Indian taxpayer, this is a lose-lose proposition.

That raises a fundamental question: What will it do to nuclear safety to grant foreign suppliers legal immunity upfront and to shift the liability to the Indian taxpayer?

Another key issue relates to the rights of victims. The Bill ensures that victims of a disaster involving a foreign-built reactor will not be able to sue the builder in its home country. Worse still, the Bill blocks the victims from suing the foreign supplier even in Indian courts.

Only the “operator shall have a right of recourse,” according to Clause 17. The state operator can sue the foreign supplier where “such right is expressly provided for in a contract in writing” and “the nuclear incident has resulted from the wilful act or gross negligence on the part of the supplier of the material, equipment or services, or of his employee.” But such a right of recourse can only be to meet the operator’s own small liability of Rs. 500 crore.

In fact, the Bill seriously shackles Indian courts. All nuclear-damage claims will be dealt with by a Claims Commissioner or a Nuclear Damage Claims Commission, and any award made “shall be final” and cannot be appealed in any court. “No civil court shall have jurisdiction to entertain any suit or proceedings in respect of any matter which the Claims Commissioner or the Commission, as the case may be, is empowered to adjudicate under this Act and no injunction shall be granted by any court or other authority in respect of any action taken or to be taken in pursuance of any power conferred by or under this Act,” according to Clause 35.

By contrast, the Price-Anderson Act permits economic (but not legal) channelling of liability, thereby allowing lawsuits and criminal proceedings against the reactor builder or any other party in U.S. courts. That is a key reason why the U.S. has not joined the Vienna or Paris convention — the two main international liability instruments. But the U.S. has become party to another convention it helped draft under the auspices of the IAEA — the Convention on Supplementary Compensation (CSC), which is still not in force. The CSC, as the name suggests, is about compensation through an international fund, to be paid “supplementary” to the liability limit.

The Bill also limits liability in time, with Clause 18 stating: “The right to claim compensation for any nuclear damage caused by a nuclear incident shall extinguish if such claim is not made within a period of 10 years from the date of incident…” That provision was retained despite the Environment Ministry’s note of caution — revealed by this newspaper — that the 10-year time limit was untenable because damage to human health from a serious radioactive release “involves changes in DNAs, resulting in mutagenic and teratogenic changes, which take a long time to manifest.”

And although the Finance Ministry, in its comments on the Bill, had warned the proposed law would “expose the government to substantial liabilities for the failings of the private sector,” the Bill essentially seeks to give foreign reactor builders a free ride at the Indian taxpayer’s expense.

The Indian Bill, in effect, amounts to a huge hidden subsidy by protecting foreign reactor builders from the weight of the financial consequences of accidents. If the Bill is passed, the costs of doing business in India for foreign suppliers will be low but the assured profits will be high. To cover the maximum potential compensation payable for an accident, a foreign builder will need to take insurance for a mere Rs. 500 crore. What is more, the foreign builders are being freed from the task of producing electricity at marketable rates. The NPCIL will run the foreign-built reactors, with the state subsidising the high-priced electricity generated.

India is under no international obligation to pass such a law. In fact, efforts to create common international standards on liability and compensation since the Chernobyl disaster have made exceedingly slow progress. Yet the Bill’s accompanying “Statement of Objects and Reasons” creates the deceptive impression that the proposed law aims to bring India in line internationally. If anything, the Bill seeks to set a wrong international precedent by its mollycoddling of foreign suppliers.

To be sure, technological improvements in reactor-safety systems have significantly lowered the risks of a major nuclear accident. Yet nuclear technology remains intrinsically dangerous, and a single catastrophe anywhere in the world will impose colossal, long-term costs nationally and have a chilling effect on the global appeal of nuclear power. Given the nuclear safety and security issues that have been highlighted by recent incidents in India, accident liability is a matter demanding serious consideration.

The Bill attempts to set a new principle in international law: Profits are private, accident-related liabilities are all public. The government must answer the central question: In seeking to invite U.S. reactor builders, should a poor country rush to pass a special law that skews the business terms in their favour, gratuitously burdens the Indian taxpayer and ignores the lessons of the Bhopal gas disaster?

Keywords: Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill, Brahma Chellaney, Bhopal gas disaster, U.S., India, General Electric, Westinghouse, NPCIL, CSC, IAEA

Learning from a failed summit

Posted on by
Reply

Three lessons from Copenhagen
By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
The Japan Times

The world now accepts that protecting our atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, biosphere and even cyberspace — the "global commons" — is the responsibility of all countries. Enforcing that norm is proving the difficult part.

And nowhere is the difficulty greater than in two areas: shielding our atmosphere from the buildup of global-warming greenhouse gases; and preventing cybercrime.

Of these two challenges, combating climate change is proving most difficult to crack. The reason for that is not hard to seek: effectively combating climate change demands fundamental shifts in national policies and approaches, as well as lifestyle changes in the developed world. It is easier to visualize than to actually devise carbon standards that can protect the material and social benefits of continued economic growth in the developing world and also help shield prosperity in the developed countries.

International climate-change negotiations are to be renewed this year. To be successful, they must heed the lessons of Copenhagen.

The first lesson is that climate change is not just a matter of science but also a matter of geopolitics. Without improved geopolitics, there can be no real fight against climate change. The expectation at Copenhagen that scientific-research results would trump geopolitics was belied.

The need to focus on improving the geopolitics is also being highlighted by the damage, however limited, to the independence of scientific research. The credibility of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has taken a beating since the Copenhagen summit, to the delight of climate-change skeptics. Just before Copenhagen we had "climate-gate," as the publication of damaging e-mail and other documents from the Climate Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia became known, exposing highly politicized scientific research in the form of manipulated or suppressed data on human-driven climate change. After Copenhagen has came the IPCC’s own "glacier-gate" scandal over one of its key claims in a 2007 report.

The IPCC had to admit that its published claim that the Himalayan glaciers are set to disappear by 2035 rested not on peer-reviewed scientific research but on two 1999 magazine interviews with one glaciologist. The glaciologist’s assertion had been recycled in a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group, World Wide Fund For Nature, and then enthusiastically picked up by the IPCC without any investigation. To IPCC’s acute mortification, the glaciologist went public after Copenhagen to say he had been misquoted in the magazine interviews.

To make matters worse, the coordinating lead author of the portion of the IPCC report, where the claim appeared, publicly acknowledged that the bogus claim had been intentionally incorporated to help put political pressure on Asian leaders.

The second lesson from Copenhagen is that to get an international deal, there first must be a deal between the U.S. and China. These two countries are very dissimilar, yet they have a similar carbon profile: Each contributes between 22 to 24 percent of all human-induced greenhouse gases in the world.

If a deal can be reached between the world’s two greatest polluting nations, which together are responsible for more than 46 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions, an international accord on climate change would be easier to reach. The United States and China, however, view the world in starkly different terms. The key point that has emerged from their latest diplomatic spats is China’s reluctance to subordinate domestic goals for larger international good, be it a climate-change regime or international efforts to put pressure scofflaw states. It also is unwilling to give up unfair practices, such as the gross undervaluation of the renminbi.

The Cold War undertones in U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent statement — likening the "information curtain" to the Iron Curtain — reflected an implicit admission that the central assumption guiding U.S. policy on China since the 1990s has gone awry: that assisting China’s economic rise would usher in political opening there. The strategy to use market forces and the Internet to open up a closed political system simply isn’t working. Indeed, the more economic power China has accumulated, the more adept it has become in extending censorship controls.

China strategically seems to bide its time until it can openly challenge the present U.S.-led global institutional structure, which has remained static since the mid-20th century. China accepts and supports parts of the existing order that serves its needs, such as the U.N. Security Council or the World Trade Organization. But it plays by its own rules when its interests do not mesh with the other parts.

In Copenhagen, China did everything to ensure no binding agreement emerged. To impede decision-making, it sent only a vice foreign minister to meetings set for the level of heads of government. It also used poor states as a front to obstruct progress through procedural wrangling.

Against that background, prospects of China and the U.S. cutting a deal on climate deal this year don’t look good. If anything, their disputes on trade, currency and security policies threaten to engender greater bilateral tensions and conflict.

A third lesson from Copenhagen, being reinforced by the present circumstances, is to have a more-realistic agenda. Too much focus has been put on carbon cuts for nearly two decades, almost to the exclusion of other elements. It is now time to disaggregate the climate-change agenda into smaller, more manageable parts. After all, a lot can be done without a binding agreement on carbon cuts through national targets.

Take energy efficiency, which can help bring a quarter of all gains in reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions. Energy inefficiency is a problem not only in the Third World, but also in the developed world. The U.S., for instance, belches out twice as much carbon dioxide per head as Japan, although the two countries have fairly similar per capita incomes.

Furthermore, given that deforestation accounts for as much as 20 percent of the emission problem, carbon storage is as important as carbon cuts. Each hectare of rain forest, for example, stores 500 tons of carbon dioxide. Forest conservation and management thus are important to tackle climate change. In fact, to help lessen the impact of climate change, states need to strategically invest in ecological restoration — growing and preserving rain forests, building wetlands and shielding species critical to our ecosystems

The international community must also focus on stemming man-made environmental change. Environmental change is distinct from climate change, although there is a tendency on the part of some enthusiasts to blur the distinction and turn global warming into a blame-all phenomenon.

Man-made environmental change is caused by reckless land use, overgrazing, depletion and contamination of surface freshwater resources, overuse of groundwater, degradation of coastal ecosystems, inefficient or environmentally unsustainable irrigation systems, waste mismanagement, and the destruction of natural habitats, including mangroves and forests. Such environmental change has no link to global warming. Yet, ultimately, it will contribute to climate variation and thus must be stopped.

In fact, man-made environmental change is the main threat to the integrity of freshwater reserves in the world. Water shortages already are reaching critical proportions in several parts of the world. And this has a bearing on food security. This suggests that goals of food security increasingly will be difficult to achieve. The World Bank has projected the demand for food to rise 50 percent by 2030, even as the present global food system struggles to meet existing demand. Today, agriculture makes up more than two-thirds of all water withdrawals globally, while contributing 14 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions — about as much as running every car, ship and plane. To grow more food demands more water. But water availability already is coming under pressure in the most densely-populated parts of the world.

In that light, we need to focus as much on the water challenge as on the energy challenge. As the Global Trends 2025 report of the U.S. National Intelligence Council has warned that although strategic rivalries in the 21st century probably would center on issues related to trade, investment, technology innovation and acquisition, "increasing worries about resources — such as energy or even water — could easily put the focus back on territorial disputes or unresolved border issues. Asia is one region where the number of such border issues is particularly noteworthy."

Climate change and environmental change, given their implications for resource security and social and economic stability, are clearly threat multipliers. While continuing to search for a binding international agreement, the international community should also explore innovative approaches, such as global public-private partnership initiatives. As the international experience since the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change bears out, it is easier to set goals than to implement them. How many state parties to the Kyoto Protocol have faithfully implemented their obligations on carbon cuts under that treaty?

The political commitments reached in principle at Copenhagen already have run into controversy as well as into varying interpretations, marring their value. They also have created bad blood between the BASIC bloc of four leading developing countries and the broader grouping of developing nations known as the Group of 77 (G77). The smaller countries in the G77 accuse the BASIC bloc of China, India, Brazil and South Africa of acting unilaterally and opaquely in stitching together that nonbinding agreement with the U.S. in Copenhagen.

The "Copenhagen Accord," an ad hoc, face-saving agreement at the eleventh hour to cover up the summit failure, seeks to commit major developing countries to "implement mitigation actions," open to "international consultations and analysis."

Its future, however, is uncertain. Only 55 of the 194 countries submitted their national action plans on climate change by the January 31 deadline, forcing the U.N. to push back the deadline indefinitely.

The BASIC bloc indeed is a partnership founded on political opportunism and is unlikely to hold for long. The carbon profiles of Brazil, India, South Africa and China are hardly similar. China’s per capita carbon emissions are more than four times higher than India’s. It rejects India’s approach that per capita emission levels and historic contributions to the buildup of greenhouse gases should form the objective criteria for carbon mitigation. China, as the world’s back factory, wants a different formula that marks down carbon intensity linked to export industries. Once criteria for mitigation action are sought to be defined in future negotiations, this alliance will unravel quickly.

More broadly, the climate-change agenda has become so politically driven that all sorts of competing economic and other interests have been tagged on by important actors. Climate change should not be allowed to become a convenient peg on which to hang assorted national interests.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.
The Japan Times: Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2010
(C) All rights reserved

India: The costs of aligning with China

Posted on by
Reply

The India Climate-Change Calculus

Aligning with China only undermines New Delhi’s negotiating position and costs its people dearly

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Wall Street Journal, December 31, 2009-January 3, 2010

China has been publicly excoriated by U.S. officials and others for opposing a binding climate-change deal at this month’s United Nations summit in Copenhagen. But the real loser was India.

By aligning itself with China’s negotiating position, India bracketed itself with the world’s largest polluting nation. This tack has been months in the works; back in October, New Delhi signed a five-year memo of understanding with Beijing and agreed, among other things, to present a united front in Copenhagen. Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh went so far as to declare there "is no difference" between the two countries’ negotiating positions.

Yet there is a huge difference in actual emissions. China is the world’s largest polluter, responsible for 24% of global carbon emissions. Most of these emissions are due to China’s economic development path, which has relied heavily on carbon-intensive, manufacturing industries. China’s per-capita carbon emissions are four times higher than India’s, which boasts the lowest per-capita emissions among all-important developing countries, at 26% of the world’s average.

China also doesn’t share India’s basic approach to curbing global warming. New Delhi wants per-capita emission levels and historic contributions to the build-up of greenhouse gases to form the objective criteria for any global carbon mitigation plan. China, as the world’s factory, wants a different formula that discounts carbon intensity linked to export industries.

Nor does India have much in common with other major developing nations, either in its carbon profile or industrial-development levels. For example, in 2007 (the latest figures available) India’s per-capita emissions totalled 1.2 tons; South Africa, 9.4; China, 4.8; and Brazil, 2.1, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

These facts argue for India to align itself with the least developed nations, which have lower emissions profiles. Yet the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh entered the Copenhagen negotiations joined at the hip with China, first by agreeing to put up a united front and then by following in Beijing’s footsteps to unveil a voluntary plan to slash its carbon intensity by 2020.

The move forced the U.S. to strike a watered-down deal with the developing-world bloc of Brazil, India, South Africa and China—rather than deal directly with the world’s largest polluter, China. The deal also committed India to "implement mitigation actions" open to "international consultations and analysis." Rather than focus on providing basic services—like electricity and safe drinking water—to the hundreds of millions of poor Indians who desperately need them, Mr. Singh also pledged to slash India’s emissions intensity by 20% "regardless of the outcome" in Copenhagen.

Past experience should have taught India that whenever it has joined hands with China on environmental issues, it has been let down by Beijing’s proclivity to jettison principles in the ruthless pursuit of self-interest. Take the 1989 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer: China teamed up with India in the negotiations, only to reverse its stance and agree to abide by the protocol if it were compensated for the compliance costs. India was forced to follow suit.

In Copenhagen, India would have done better to delink itself from China and the other two leading developing nations and to encourage the world’s largest polluters—the U.S. and China—to do a deal.

India not only aligned itself with the wrong group, but also it presented itself inadvertently as a major global polluter by making common cause with China, whose developmental path threatens to unleash a carbon tsunami on the world. After all, had the situation in Copenhagen been reversed—with India’s per-capita emissions four times higher than China’s, and with India in the line of international fire—would Beijing have helped provide New Delhi diplomatic cover?

Mr. Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of "On the Frontline of Climate Change: International Security Implications" (Konrad Adenauer Foundation, 2007).

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 http://ow.ly/RhNt

Why India Lost Out in Copenhagen

Posted on by
Reply

India unwisely provided China cover

India, far from gaining anything by aligning itself with China at Copenhagen, only undercut its interest by getting bracketed with the world’s largest polluter and being made to accept mitigation obligations, writes Brahma Chellaney

Make no mistake: China, the world’s largest net polluter whose carbon emissions are growing at the fastest rate, was the principal target at Copenhagen, which has given its imprimatur to revising the climate-change regime. But China cleverly deflected pressure by hiding behind India and other developing countries. 

China, however, has little in common with India. With its carbon-intensive, manufacturing-based economy, China’s per-capita carbon emissions are four times higher than India’s. India, with its white-collar, services-driven economy, has the lowest per-capita emissions among all important developing countries. Although both countries seem to have similar competitive advantages, China’s rise has been on the back of an increasing export surge that has made it the world’s back factory for cheap goods, while India’s imports-dependent economy is carbon light, reflected in the fact that its per-capita emissions are just 26 per cent of the world average.

Yet, in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit, India signed a five-year understanding with China to present a united front in international climate-change negotiations, with the Indian minister of state for environment, in a hallucinatory loop of delusion, going to the extent of saying that there “is no difference between the Indian and Chinese negotiating positions.” What is the commonality between the two countries when China openly rejects India’s approach that per-capita emission levels and historic contributions to the build-up of greenhouse gases should form the objective criteria for carbon mitigation? China, as the world’s back factory, wants a different formula that marks down carbon intensity linked to exports.

Had the situation been the opposite — with India’s per-capita emissions four times higher than China’s, and with India in the line of international fire — would Beijing helped provide New Delhi diplomatic cover? India gained little by aligning itself with China at Copenhagen. Indeed, it ended up undercutting its interest by getting bracketed with the world’s largest net polluter and being made to accept mitigation action under international monitoring under undefined international monitoring. In the process, it has helped formulate, even if unintentionally, the broad terms for revising what admirably suits Indian interests — the existing climate-change regime.

The price for providing political cover to China at Copenhagen is that carbon-thin India got roped in to commit itself to mitigation when hundreds of millions of Indians have no access to most-basic rights: Electricity and safe water. Instead of a deal being struck between the world’s two largest polluters, the U.S. and China, the U.S. was forced to cut a deal with the BASIC bloc comprising Brazil, India, South Africa and China, because China expediently hid behind that banner. In fact, India has little in common even with South Africa and Brazil either in carbon or industrial-development level. While India’s per-capita emission was 1.2 tons in 2007, it was 9.4 in South Africa, 2.1 in Brazil and 4.8 in China, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data.

India not only aligned itself with the wrong group, but also it presented itself inadvertently as a major global polluter by making common cause with China, whose developmental path threatens to unleash a carbon tsunami on the world. As China and India gain economic heft, it has become fashionable to internationally pair them. But these two demographic titans are a study in contrast on carbon intensity, with China now responsible for 24 per cent of global carbon emissions with 19.8 percent of the world population, but India’s current contribution not matching even half its population size. India indeed has more in common with the poor countries that cried foul over the U.S.-BASIC deal.

India would have done better at Copenhagen had it not associated itself so closely with China. It should have gone into the negotiations by consciously seeking to de-hyphenate itself from China, including by pointing out that China has more in common with the U.S. than with India. After all, the U.S. (currently responsible for 22 per cent of global emissions) and China, as the top polluters, have emerged as the key “problem states” in combating climate change.

But instead of de-hyphenating itself, India went into the negotiations as if it were joined at the hip with China, first by agreeing to put up a united stance and then by following in Beijing’s footsteps to unveil a plan to slash its carbon intensity by 2020. Not only was the target of 20 to 25 per cent reductions disproportionate to the level of Indian emissions, but it also made India ripe in Copenhagen for acceptance of mitigation action. In any case, it was poor negotiating strategy to announce such a major voluntary concession beforehand.

Past experience should have taught India that whenever it has joined hands with China on environmental issues, it has been let down by the Chinese proclivity to jettison principles and play power politics to serve its narrow interests. Take the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. In the negotiations, it teamed up India, only to reverse its stance and leave India in the lurch. It agreed to abide by the protocol if it were compensated for the compliance costs. That forced India eventually to take that very position, lest it stood out as a loner. Under the Kyoto Protocol, China — through international manoeuvring — has captured the bulk of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) funding.

How much it suits China to be seen in the same class as India on carbon issues than with its real polluting peer, the U.S., was made clear by the post-Copenhagen telephone call the Chinese foreign minister made to his Indian counterpart to emphasize continuing Sino-Indian collaboration. But when it comes to global or Asian geopolitics, China insists India is in a junior league.

New Delhi can be sure that when criteria for mitigation action is defined in future negotiations, China will work to unduly burden India by insisting that weight be given to elements other than per-capita emission levels and historic contributions. Having unwittingly aided the Chinese game-plan in Copenhagen, India is set to come out a loser. Isn’t that precisely what India did on UN Security Council permanent membership? When the U.S. and Soviet Union offered India a permanent seat in 1955, Jawaharlal Nehru demurred, according to his own collected works, saying the seat rightfully belonged to China. Now, China is the main obstacle to India’s UNSC aspirations.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research, is the author of “On the Frontline of Climate Change: International Security Implications”.

(c) The Economic Times, January 7, 2009.

Copenhagen: A key step toward new climate-change regime

Posted on by
Reply

Door opens to climate-change NPT

Brahma Chellaney

The Economic Times, December 22, 2009

The global climate negotiations in Copenhagen did
not produce an ambitious, legally binding action plan for reducing
greenhouse gas emissions. But Copenhagen did yield
something significant: It won political commitments from China, India,
Brazil and South Africa to
be part of the solution and thus to an overhaul of the present climate-change
regime, which puts the carbon-mitigation onus entirely on the developed
countries.

Future international negotiations would proceed on the basis of
these political commitments, enshrined in the so-called Copenhagen Accord. The
1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 1992 UN Framework Convention — the two legs of the
current regime — would become less relevant.

President Barack Obama’s 13 hours of negotiations in Copenhagen yielded a two-fold success for the U.S.: First,
the country which emits more than a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases with
just 4.5 per cent of the global population escaped without making any binding commitment.
Second, Obama brought on board not only China,
Brazil and South Africa but also the much-poorer India, whose
per-capita emissions are far lower than any important developing country. India is to submit
to a universal system of transparently reporting on national mitigation actions.

Put simply, Copenhagen
generated not a new international protocol but the political framework to
revamp the existing climate-change regime. Changing the terms of negotiations
is essential to changing a regime. The Copenhagen Accord embodies the new
terms.

For the developed countries, this symbolizes success. There isn’t
even a passing reference in the Copenhagen Accord to historic contributions to the build-up of
greenhouse gases or to an objective criteria factoring in per-capita emission
levels.

For India, this has
meant a diplomatic climbdown from its negotiating stance. It has agreed to bear
an economic burden for combating climate change when hundreds of millions of Indians are
still mired in abject poverty.

The rich states, by securing
an interim accord tying their carbon cuts to burden-sharing with the
underprivileged, have opened the doors to the creation of an NPT on climate
change. Indeed, Obama, in his next major international move, is hosting a
summit meeting in April to strengthen the nuclear NPT.

The significant aspect, in
comparative terms, is that the most-powerful players want to reinforce the
nuclear non-proliferation regime but revamp the climate-change regime by
re-jiggering their legal obligations. So the key words are: Preserve, uphold
and strengthen the NPT regime, but update, rework and improve the
climate-change regime.

In other words, the NPT
regime is being treated as sacrosanct that cannot be tinkered with or amended, even
as the Copenhagen Accord presents the climate-change regime as an evolutionary
process open to overhaul. Given that the NPT regime predates the climate-change
regime by a generation and a half, one would have thought that it is the former
that needs updating, if any.

Having paid a heavy price to
the NPT regime, India
now has agreed to pay a price in a new climate-change regime. By contrast, China — a winner in the NPT regime because it first
concentrated, unlike India, on acquiring military muscle
— has less to lose in a new
climate-change regime. After all, as the world’s largest net polluter, China has more in common with the U.S. than India.

Copenhagen has shown that climate change is not just about science
but about geopolitics too. And in geopolitics, those with economic and military
muscle fare better.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at
the Centre for Policy Research, is the author of “On the Frontline of Climate
Change: International Security Implications.” 

Climate change: Risks to India’s national security

Posted on by
Reply
Climate Risks to Indian National Security

Brahma Chellaney
From: Indian Climate Policy: Choices and Challenges, Edited By
David Michel and Amit Pandya (Washington, DC: Stimson Center, November 2009)

India may be a great power-in-waiting, but it probably lives in the world’s
worst neighborhood. Whichever way India looks, it sees crisis across its
frontiers. The tyranny of geography that India confronts is only getting worse,
putting greater pressure on its security. To this picture must now be added the
risks from climate change, which has been correctly identified as a threat
multiplier. What all this underscores is the need for the Indian republic to evolve
more dynamic and innovative approaches to diplomacy and national defense as
well as to build greater state capacity in order to meet contingencies.

Climate change, unfortunately, has become a divisive issue internationally before
a plan for a low-carbon future has evolved. At a time of greater international
divisiveness on core challenges – from disarmament and terrorism to the energy
crisis and the Doha Round of world trade talks – the world can ill afford political
rancor over a climate crisis that threatens to exacerbate security challenges.
While gaps in scientific knowledge make it easy to exaggerate or underestimate
the likely impact of climate change, three broad strategic effects can be
visualized in relation to India.

MULTIPLYING CLIMATE THREATS
1. Climate change would intensify interstate and intrastate competition over
natural resources, making resource conflicts more likely.

A new Great Game over water could unfold, given China’s control over the
source of most of Asia’s major rivers—the Plateau of Tibet. Accelerated melting
of glaciers and mountain snows would affect river water flows, although higher
average temperatures are likely to bring more rainfall in the tropics.

Intrastate water disputes already are endemic in Asia, with India being the most
prominent case. But it is the potential for interstate water conflict in Asia that
ought to be of greater concern because of the strategic ramifications.

Tibet’s water-related status in the world indeed is unique. No other area in the
world is a water repository of such size, serving as a lifeline for nearly half of the
global population living in southern and southeastern Asia and China. Tibet’s
vast glaciers, huge underground springs, and high altitude have endowed it with
the world’s greatest river systems. But China is now pursuing major inter-basin
and inter-river water transfer projects on the Tibetan plateau which threaten to
diminish international river flows into India and other co-riparian states. In fact,
China has been damming most international rivers flowing out of Tibet (Tibet’s
fragile ecosystem is already threatened by global warming). The only rivers on
which no hydro-engineering works have been undertaken so far are the Indus
(whose basin falls mostly in India and Pakistan), and the Salween (which flows
into Burma and Thailand.) Local authorities in China’s Yunnan province,
however, are considering damming the Salween in the quake-prone upstream
region.

Before such hydro-engineering projects sow the seeds of water conflict, China
ought to build institutionalized, cooperative river basin arrangements with
downstream states. Against this background, it is hardly a surprise that water is
becoming a key security issue in Sino-Indian relations and is a potential source of
enduring discord. India has been pressing China for transparency, greater
hydrological data-sharing, and a commitment not to redirect the natural flow of
any river or diminish cross-border water flows. But even a joint expert-level
mechanism – set up in 2007 merely for “interaction and cooperation” on
hydrological data – has proven of little value. The most dangerous idea China is
toying with is the northward rerouting of the Brahmaputra River, known as
Yarlung Tsangpo to Tibetans. Diversion of the Brahmaputra’s water to the
parched Yellow River is an idea that China does not discuss in public because the
project implies environmental devastation of India’s northeastern plains and
eastern Bangladesh and would thus be akin to a declaration of water war against
India and Bangladesh.

China and India already are water-stressed economies. The spread of irrigated
farming and water-intensive industries – together with the demands of a rising
middle class – have led to a severe struggle for more water. Indeed, both
countries have entered an era of perennial water scarcity. Rapid economic
growth could slow in the face of acute scarcity if the demand for water continues
to grow at its current frantic pace. Such a development would transform China
and India – both food-exporting countries – into major importers and would thus
exacerbate the global food crisis.

2. Higher frequency of extreme weather events (such as hurricanes, flooding,
and drought) and a rise in ocean levels are likely to spur greater interstate
and intrastate migration – especially of the poor and the vulnerable – from
the delta and coastal regions to the hinterlands.

Such an influx of outsiders would socially swamp inland areas and upset existing
fragile ethnic balances—provoking a backlash that strains internal and regional
security. It should not be forgotten that many societies in the region are a potent
mix of ethnicity, culture, and religion.

India, for example, could face a huge refugee influx from the world’s seventh
most populous country, Bangladesh. Having been born in blood in 1971,
Bangladesh faces extinction from saltwater incursion, with the International
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) saying that country is set to lose 17 percent of
its land and 30 percent of its food production by 2050. Bangladesh today faces a
rising frequency of natural disasters. In addition to the millions of Bangladeshis
that already have illegally settled in India, New Delhi would have to brace up for
the potential arrival of tens of millions more people.

For India, the ethnic expansion of Bangladesh beyond its political borders not
only sets up enduring trans-border links, but it also makes New Delhi’s alreadycomplex
task of border management even more onerous. As brought out by
Indian census figures, Indian districts bordering Bangladesh have become
Bangladeshi-majority areas. It is perhaps the first time in modern history that a
country has expanded its ethnic frontiers without expanding its political borders.
“Climate refugees,” however, would not all come from across India’s borders.
Within India itself, those driven out by floods, cyclones, and saltwater incursion
would head for settlements on higher ground. In some cases, the effects of such
refugee influxes would be to undermine social stability and internal cohesion
locally.

3. Human security will be the main casualty as climate change delivers a major
blow to vulnerable economic sectors.

Economic and social disparities – already wide in Indian society – would
intensify. The fact that there is a Maoist insurgency in the poorest districts of
India at a time when the country is booming economically is a testament to the
costs of growing inequalities. That ragtag band of rebels wishes to supplant
Indian parliamentary democracy with a proletariat dictatorship inspired by Mao
Zedong’s Little Red Book.

The specter of resource competition, large-scale movement of “climate
refugees,” social and political tensions, and a higher frequency and intensity of
extreme weather events helps underscore the human-security costs. Climate
variability will bring change to the social-economic-political environments on
which the security of individuals and communities rest. Authorities – as well as
communities – will be forced to innovate and manage under a climate changedriven
paradigm. Building greater institutional and organizational capacity,
early-warning systems, more efficient irrigation practices, and new farm varieties
will all become necessary.

THE FRONTLINE OF CLIMATE CHANGE
Against this background, India is likely to find itself on the frontline of climate
change. To deal with these national security implications, India needs to frame
the concept of security more broadly and redefine its defense planning and
preparedness. Unconventional challenges – from transnational terrorism to
illegal refugee inflows – already have become significant in India’s security
calculus. India also needs to build greater state capacity – at federal, provincial,
and local levels – to tackle various contingencies and adapt to a climate changedriven
paradigm. Climate change holds the greatest risks for India in the
agricultural sector—a sector that employs half of the Indian workforce and yet
makes up just 18 percent of the GDP. The challenge of ensuring food security
and social stability demands greater national investments in rural infrastructure
and agriculture and also simultaneously requires finding a way to leapfrog to
green technologies.

A lot can be done to combat climate change outside any regime. India’s US$ 22
billion solar-energy program, US$ 2.5 billion forestation fund, and new national
energy-efficiency mission are initiatives in the right direction.

Internationally, though, Indian diplomacy must ensure that the country is not
saddled with unfair obligations that compound its challenges. Equity in burdensharing
has to be ensured. The challenge is to devise carbon standards that help
protect the material and social benefits of economic growth in the developing
world without damaging prosperity in the developed countries.

But just as the five original nuclear weapons states helped fashion the 1970
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) to perpetuate their privileges, countries
that became wealthy early wish to preserve their prerogatives in a climate change
regime despite their legacy of environmental damage and continuing high carbon
emissions. This has raised the danger of rich nations locking in their advantages
by revising the 1992 Rio bargain and re-jiggering the Kyoto Protocol obligations
through a new regime. This could create another global divide between haves
and have-nots—an NPT of climate change. An enduring international regime to
combat global warming will have to be anchored in differential responsibility, a
concept at the heart of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change and the Kyoto Protocol (it is a concept also embedded in international
law through several other agreements—from the Montreal Protocol on
Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer to the Treaty of Maastricht.) Climate
change, it is evident, is not just a matter of science but also a matter of
geopolitics.

China’s Hydra-Headed Hydropolitics

Posted on by
Reply

The
Sino-Indian Divide Over Water

Brahma
Chellaney

A globally syndicated column. Copyright: Project Syndicate

As China and India gain economic heft, they are drawing
ever more international attention at the time of an ongoing global shift of
power to Asia. Their underlying strategic
dissonance and rivalry, however, usually attracts less notice.

As its power grows, China seems
determined to choke off Asian competitors, a tendency reflected in its
hardening stance toward India.
This includes aggressive patrolling of the disputed Himalayan frontier by the
People’s Liberation Army, many violations of the line of control separating the
two giants, new assertiveness concerning India’s northeastern Arunachal Pradesh
state — which China claims as its own — and vituperative attacks on India in
the state-controlled Chinese media.

The issues that divide India and China, however,
extend beyond territorial disputes. Water is becoming a key security issue in
Sino-Indian relations and a potential source of enduring discord.

China and India already are
water-stressed economies. The spread of irrigated farming and water-intensive
industries, together with the demands of a rising middle class, have led to a
severe struggle for more water. Indeed, both countries have entered an era of
perennial water scarcity, which before long is likely to equal, in terms of per
capita availability, the water shortages found in the Middle
East.

Rapid economic growth could slow in the face of acute
scarcity if demand for water continues to grow at its current frantic pace,
turning China and India — both food-exporting countries — into major importers,
a development that would accentuate the global food crisis.

Even though India has
more arable land than China —
160.5 million hectares compared to 137.1 million hectares — Tibet is
the source of most major Indian rivers. The Tibetan plateau’s vast glaciers,
huge underground springs and high altitude make Tibet the world’s largest
freshwater repository after the polar icecaps. Indeed, all of Asia’s major
rivers, except the Ganges, originate in
the Tibetan plateau. Even the Ganges’ two main tributaries flow in from Tibet.

But China is
now pursuing major inter-basin and inter-river water transfer projects on the
Tibetan plateau, which threatens to diminish international-river flows into India and
other co-riparian states. Before such hydro-engineering projects sow the seeds
of water conflict, China ought
to build institutionalized, cooperative river-basin arrangements with
downstream states.

Upstream dams, barrages, canals, and irrigation systems
can help fashion water into a political weapon that can be wielded overtly in a
war, or subtly in peacetime to signal dissatisfaction with a co-riparian state.
Even denial of hydrological data in a critically important season can amount to
the use of water as a political tool. Flash floods in recent years in two
Indian frontier states — Himachal Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh — served as an
ugly reminder of China’s
lack of information-sharing on its upstream projects. Such leverage could in
turn prompt a downstream state to build up its military capacity to help
counterbalance this disadvantage.

In fact, China has
been damming most international rivers flowing out of Tibet, whose
fragile ecosystem is already threatened by global warming. The only rivers on
which no hydro-engineering works have been undertaken so far are the Indus,
whose basin falls mostly in India and Pakistan, and the Salween, which flows into Burma and Thailand. Local authorities
in Yunnan province, however, are
considering damming the Salween in
the quake-prone upstream region.

India’s government has been pressing China for
transparency, greater hydrological data-sharing, and a commitment not to
redirect the natural flow of any river or diminish cross-border water flows.
But even a joint expert-level mechanism — set up in 2007 merely for "interaction
and cooperation" on hydrological data — has proven of little value.

The most-dangerous idea China is
contemplating is the northward rerouting of the Brahmaputra river, known as
Yarlung Tsangpo to Tibetans, but which China has renamed Yaluzangbu.
It is the world’s highest river, and also one of the fastest-flowing. Diversion
of the Brahmaputra’s water to the parched Yellow river is an idea that China does not discuss in public, because
the project implies environmental devastation of India‘s northeastern plains and eastern Bangladesh, and would thus be akin to a
declaration of water war on India and Bangladesh.

Nevertheless, an officially blessed book published in
2005, Tibet’s Waters
Will Save China, openly championed the northward rerouting of the Brahmaputra. Moreover, the Chinese desire to divert the
Brahmaputra by employing "peaceful nuclear explosions" to build an
underground tunnel through the Himalayas found expression in the international
negotiations in Geneva in
the mid-1990s on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). China sought
unsuccessfully to exempt PNEs from the CTBT, a pact still not in force.

The issue now is not whether China will reroute the Brahmaputra, but when. Once authorities complete their
feasibility studies and the diversion scheme begins, the project will be
presented as a fait accompli. China already
has identified the bend where the Brahmaputra forms the world’s longest and
deepest canyon — just before entering India — as the diversion
point.

China’s ambitions to channel Tibetan waters northward
have been whetted by two factors: the completion of the Three Gorges Dam,
which, despite the project’s glaring environmental pitfalls, China trumpets as
the greatest engineering feat since the construction of the Great Wall; and the
power of President Hu Jintao, whose background fuses two key elements — water
and Tibet. Hu, a hydrologist by training, owes his swift rise in the Communist
Party hierarchy to the brutal martial-law crackdown he carried out in Tibet in
1989.

China’s hydro-engineering projects and plans are a reminder
that Tibet is
at the heart of the India-China divide. Tibet ceased
to be a political buffer when China annexed it nearly six decades
ago. But Tibet can
still become a political bridge between China and India. For that
to happen, water has to become a source of cooperation, not conflict.

Brahma
Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Center for Policy Research
in New Delhi.

Copyright: Project
Syndicate, 2009.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/contributor/1629

Oil sheikhdoms and the rise of Islamist threat

Posted on by
Reply

Oiling transnational terrorism

Oil prices are sure to rebound before long, ensuring that the Gulf sheikhdoms enjoy overflowing coffers and a growing heft to fund extremist groups, like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, long fattened with Saudi petrodollars, says Brahma Chellaney

The Economic Times, December 24, 2008

There is an inverse correlation between the price of oil and the price of freedom, as has been pointed out by American commentator Thomas Friedman. An oil-price spike not only spurs greater transfer of wealth to the oil-exporting nations, but also undercuts the spread of freedom by instilling or strengthening authoritarianism and arming the Gulf states with greater clout to fund fundamentalism and extremism elsewhere.

The current oil-price crash might create an illusion that the era of sky-high international prices is over. Before plummeting below $50 a barrel in November-end, the price of crude oil had gone from $30 in 2001 to as high as $147 in July 2008, creating an unprecedented bonanza for oil-exporting nations.

But for many oil-consuming states in the developing world, the high price of oil created an unfavourable balance-of-payments position. One such state, the terror-exporting Pakistan, has just been pulled back from the brink of bankruptcy through US munificence, including a $7.6 billion IMF bailout package announced on the eve of the Mumbai terrorist assaults. The precipitous drop in the oil price, on the other hand, spells trouble not only for petro-states like Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Bolivia, but also nations like Egypt and Jordan where gulf money has helped shore up strained economies.

When viewed against a long-term picture of demand and supply, the sudden price crash is just not sustainable. Compared to the 1974 level, the price of oil, if adjusted against inflation, ought to be about $100 a barrel today. Given that there are 159 litres in one barrel of oil, the current price of “black gold”, as oil is called, is indeed cheaper than that of bottled mineral water.

Unlike the oil-price increases in the 1970s and early 1980s — triggered by cartelization and deliberate supply restriction — the price spike in recent years arose from two fundamental factors: mounting demand, especially in the emerging economies; and the flattening of production in key non-OPEC countries.

Finding new sources of oil is already becoming harder, with the environment now more difficult geographically and geologically. Also, as history attests, every phase of cheaper oil prices has carried the seeds of the next price spike and energy shock. For example, when in 1985-86 the price crashed from $45 to $9, energy saving and efficiency fell out of fashion. Today, suppliers are already cutting back on production and postponing new projects.

In that light, the oil price is sure to rebound before long. However, even if the price were to stay ridiculously low at $50 a barrel, the oil sheikhdoms of the Gulf will still receive more than $350 billion a year at their current rate of production. And if the price spirals to $150, their oil revenue will surpass $1 trillion a year. Such continuous transfers of immense wealth to the sparsely populated sheikhdoms — which have more foreign workers than citizens — holds major long-term strategic implications, including for the global fight against fundamentalism and terrorism.

Soaring wealth, coupled with their control over the world’s most-bountiful oil resources, gives these weak, feudal, internally-troubled sheikhdoms a disproportionate clout in world affairs — a heft they have misused.

After the 1970s’ oil-price shocks opened the flow of rising revenues, several sheikhdoms began funnelling some of their earnings to the promotion of Wahhabi Islam, including the establishment of jihad-spouting madrassas overseas. It was not an accident that the rise of Islamic conservatism and extremism — from Morocco and Sudan to Malaysia and Indonesia — began from the 1980s with the aid of petrodollars. Today, funds continue to be channelled to Islamist groups.

Take the Al Qaeda-linked Lashkar-e-Taiba. Although it was established as a front organization of the Pakistani intelligence to bleed India, this Punjabi-dominated outfit has long been fattened with Saudi petrodollars. As Husain Haqqani, now Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington, put it in a 2005 article, the Lashkar-e-Taiba is a Wahhabist group, “backed by Saudi money and protected by Pakistani intelligence services”, that targets India, Israel and the US as “existential enemies of Islam”. 

From the United Arab Emirates’ sheltering of international fugitives and terrorism-financing conduit role to Saudi Arabia’s continued bankrolling of jihadist groups overseas, the oil sheikhdoms have shown contempt for international norms. Their post-9/11 promises to clean up their alleged philanthropic acts have not been fully honoured.

This state of affairs is simply intolerable. Can the security of secular, pluralistic states be allowed to be undermined by despots whose wealth and power flow from the gigantic oil reserves on which they sit, often by usurping the resources of minorities?

Saudi Wahhabi wealth has been built from Shiite resources. The two million Shiites of Saudi Arabia may constitute only up to 15 per cent of the national population. But they dominate the oases of Qatif and al-Hasa in the Eastern Province, the source of 90 per cent of Saudi oil production and the seat of the world’s greatest oil reserves. In Iraq, too, the oil resources are concentrated in non-Sunni areas. The US occupation has helped end, however inadvertently, the Iraqi Sunni domination of the majority Shiite population.

Take another Sunni-governed oil sheikhdom, Bahrain, where the Shiites form up to 75 per cent of the population. The Bahraini Sunni elites have cosy tribal affiliations with the Saudi elite (going to the extent of granting Bahraini citizenship to Saudi Sunnis on demand) but maintain a distance from the majority Shiite population at home. 

Shiites have been suppressed and treated as second-class citizens in a number of societies since the time the Prophet’s grandson, Hussein, was beheaded by Sunnis in A.D. 656. Today, there is a Shiite reawakening across West Asia, with Jordan’s King Abdullah II even raising the spectre of a “Shiite crescent” stretching from Iran and Iraq to Syria and Lebanon.

Given that the Sunni-run sheikhdoms plus Iran hold some two-thirds of the global oil reserves and that Saudi Arabia alone is projected by 2025 to produce more oil than Africa and the Caspian Sea basin combined, international security will be better served by actively promoting democratization in the region than by propping up tyrannical regimes such as the one run by the House of Saud. 

(The writer is a strategic affairs expert.)

(c) The Economic Times

Forestalling water conflict in Asia

Posted on by
Reply

Beware of Water Wars

 

China’s hydro-engineering projects in Tibet raise serious concerns

 

Brahma Chellaney

The Times of India, November 24, 2008

 

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s disclosure that during his recent Beijing visit he raised the issue of international rivers flowing out of Tibet underscores the enormous implications of China’s hydro-engineering projects and plans. Through its control over the Tibet plateau, China controls the flow of several major river systems that are a lifeline to southern and southeastern Asia. Yet China is toying with massive inter-basin and inter-river water transfer projects. Its Great South-North Water Transfer Project is an overly ambitious engineering attempt to take water through manmade canals to its semi-arid north. The diversion of waters from the Tibetan plateau in this project’s third leg is an idea enthusiastically backed by President Hu Jintao, a hydrologist by training whose 1989 martial-law crackdown in Tibet helped facilitate his swift rise in the communist party hierarchy.

            Water is getting tied to security in several parts of the world. The battles of yesterday were fought over land. Those of today are over energy. But the battles of tomorrow will be over water. And nowhere else does that prospect look real than Asia, the largest and most densely populated continent that awaits a future made hotter and drier by global warming. According to a 2006 UN report, Asia has less fresh water — 3,920 cubic metres per person — than any other continent other than the Antarctica.

With the world’s fastest-rising military expenditures, most-dangerous hot spots and fiercest resource competition, Asia appears the most likely flash-point for water wars — a concern underscored by attempts by some states to exploit their riparian position or dominance. Riparian dominance impervious to international legal principles can create a situation where water allocations to co-riparian states become a function of political fiat.

Upstream dams, barrages, canals and irrigation systems can help fashion water as a political weapon — a weapon that can be wielded overtly in a war, or subtly in peacetime to signal dissatisfaction with a co-riparian state. Even denial of hydrological data in a critically important season can amount to the use of water as a political tool. Such leverage could in turn prompt a downstream state to build up its military capabilities to help counterbalance the riparian disadvantage.

Except for Japan, Malaysia and Burma, Asian states already face water shortages. A different water-related problem confronts some low-lying states like Bangladesh and the Maldives, whose very future of is at stake due to creeping saltwater incursion and frequent flooding. Bangladesh today has too much water, yet not enough to meet its needs. Born in blood in 1971, it faces the spectre of a watery grave.

China and India already are water-stressed economies. The spread of irrigated farming and water-intensive industries and a rising middle class are drawing attention to their serious struggle for more water. The two giants have entered an era of perennial water shortages, which before long are likely to parallel, in terms of per-capita availability, the Mideast scarcity. Their rapid economic growth could slow if their demand for water continues to grow at the present frenetic pace. Water shortages, furthermore, threaten to turn food-exporting China and India into major importers — a development that would seriously accentuate the global food crisis.

 

Even though India’s usable arable land is larger than China’s — 160.5 million hectares compared to 137.1 million hectares — the source of all the major Indian rivers except one is the Tibetan plateau. While the Ganges originates on the Indian side of the Himalayas, its two main tributaries flow in from Tibet. This is the world’s largest plateau, whose vast glaciers, huge underground springs and high altitude have endowed it with the greatest river systems. Almost all the major rivers of Asia originate there. Tibet’s status thus is unique: No other area in the world is a water repository of such size, serving as a lifeline for much of an entire continent.

 

In the stark words of Premier Wen Jiabao, water scarcity threatens the very “survival of the Chinese nation”. But in seeking to address that challenge, China’s gargantuan projects threaten to damage the delicate Tibetan ecosystem. They also carry seeds of inter-riparian conflict. The hydropolitics in the Mekong river basin, for example, can only get sharper as China, ignoring the concerns of downstream states, completes more upstream dams on the Mekong.

 

While making half-hearted attempts to stanch Indian fears about the prospective diversion of the Brahmaputra northward, Beijing has identified the bend where the Brahmaputra forms the world’s longest and deepest canyon, just before entering India, as holding the largest untapped reserves for meeting China’s water and energy needs. A Sino-Indian conflict over the sharing of the Brahmaputra waters, for instance, would begin no sooner than China begins to build the world’s largest hydropower plant on the river’s Great Bend. Upstream projects already have been held responsible for flash floods in Arunachal and Himachal Pradesh.

 

The way to forestall or manage water disputes in Asia is to build cooperative river-basin arrangements involving all riparian neighbours. Such institutional arrangements ought to centre on transparency, information sharing, pollution control and a pledge not to redirect the natural flow of trans-boundary rivers or undertake projects that would diminish cross-border flows. The successful interstate basin agreements (such as over the Indus, the Nile and the Senegal) are founded on such principles. In the absence of institutionalized cooperation over shared resources, peace will be the casualty in Asia as water becomes the new battleground.

 

The writer is a strategic affairs analyst.

 

 (c) Times of India, 2008.

Jakarta Post interview with Professor Brahma Chellaney

Posted on by
Reply
Water, the future’s gold?

Jakarta Post, 09/30/2008

Attention is regularly paid to the energy crisis, especially in regards to world oil reserves — yet water continues to be taken for granted. Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, India, talked about averting water wars in Asia during a recent water seminar in Bali. He spoke with The Jakarta Post’s Stevie Emilia about the looming threat of the water crisis.

The Jakarta Post: It seems like the energy problem gets more attention than the water crisis. What are your thoughts?

Chellaney: If you look at the world 25 years ago, people did not believe that energy would become a major concern internationally, that there would be competition for energy, and that energy sources would become scarce.

The issue 25 years ago was about the price of oil, not about oil scarcity, not about demand outstripping supply. People thought that more and more oil would be discovered and there would be enough oil for all of us until new technology was developed for generating energy, especially technology to harness nature to generate electricity, for example.

It is similar about water today. We take water for granted. We do not recognize that many parts of the world are experiencing water scarcity, especially in Asia.

Large parts of Asia are water-stressed and unless this issue is taken seriously and we manage over water resources wisely, I think in years to come we will face acute water scarcity that will affect our economic development and in turn, other aspects in our life — from public health to sanitation.

Are you suggesting the water problem be given more attention?

You see, the battle 50 years ago was fought over land. The battle of today is over energy. The battle of tomorrow will be fought over water.

So the question is, do we wait until tomorrow arrives or do we prepare to address water issues today in a more sensible way because to some extent, the water scarcity is caused by poor water management by countries.

Will there be any alternatives?

This is the big difference between energy and water. If the energy supplies stop, the economy stops. If water supplies stop, then life itself stops because water is essential to our very existence. It is essential to good health, it is essential for the economy. Without water, we cannot survive.

We have developed technology to harness nature, there is wind power, solar power and geothermal energy, but for water, we have no such substitute. Water is irreplaceable. So sensibly conserving water, recycling water, rainwater harvesting and drinking water management are the only choices we have. We have no other options.

What is the water situation in Asia today?

Per capita availability of water in Asia today is rivalling water scarcity in the Middle East. People do not realize this. Water scarcity in the Middle East is acute. In Asia, uneven distribution of water makes per capita availability of water in countries like China and India almost close to water scarcity in the Middle East.

Do you think Asians are aware of such a fact? I don’t think so, because water is an issue which is looked at on a sub-regional or sub-national level. Water scarcity in Thailand, for instance, is already an issue there, but it is not an issue that the whole of Thailand is looking at. The situation is similar in India.

People take water for granted. Sadly, water is not priced properly. There is no market price for water.

Water will become an increasingly competitive commodity. There will be competition for water sources, competition within countries and between countries. This can create potential for water-related tension and water conflicts. Water insecurity in general is a factor that will create instability and tension.

How can a water crisis trigger a war?

Some countries are located upstream on international rivers and such countries have the control over the water sources.

They can, for instance, fashion water into a weapon against countries located downstream. They can do it by building dams, canals and other facilities that divert waters or help to control water flow to a co-riparian state.

How can we avert a water war in Asia?

There are three things that can be done. First is to efficiently manage water resources by looking at long-term implications of water and security. Water management will have to be an important policy priority. As part of water management, we’ll have to look at water conservation, water efficiency, recycling and rainwater harvesting.

Second is to build institutional cooperation over the sharing of international rivers — there are 57 interstate river basins in Asia — to ensure there will be no conflicts over sharing of river waters from interstate basins.

Third is to set international rules to govern shared water resources. At present, international law is very weak, almost nonexistent on water issues. We need to create international norms or international legal principles on issues like sharing of water from interstate rivers and aquifers.

When should we start doing these three things?

We have to start doing these things because if we do not grapple with these issues now, then in 10 to 15 years from now, water-security issues will become a very destabilizing factor in Asia.

Copyright © 2008 The Jakarta Post – PT Bina Media Tenggara. All Rights Reserved.